I recently re-read Evelyn Underhill’s Practical Mysticism, and what a great book this is for breaking Christian Mysticism down and weaving the contemplative practice into! I’ve got so many ‘dog-ears’ that it’s tough to pick from, but let me take a passage from one to share:

He (the mystic) must not subject it (our sensation) to the cooking, filtering process of the brain. It is because he knows how to elude this dreadful sophistication of Reality, because his attitude to the universe is governed by the supreme artistic virtues of humility and love, poetry is what it is: and I include in the sweep of poetic art the colored poetry of the painter, and the wordless poetry of the musician and the dancer too.

At this point the critical reader will certainly offer an objection. “You have been inviting me,”he will say, “to do nothing more or less than trust my senses… Many of these sensations we share with the animals: in some, the animals obviously surpass us. Will you suggest that my terrier, smelling his way through an uncoordinated universe, is a better mystic then I?”

To this I reply, that the terrier’s contacts with the world are doubtless crude and imperfect; yet he has indeed preserved a directness of apprehension which you have lost. He gets, and responds to, the real smell; not a notion or a name. Certainly the senses, when taken at face-value, do deceive us: yet the deception resides not so much in them, as in the conceptual world which we insist on building up from their reports, and for which we make them responsible. They deceive us less when we receive these reports uncooked and unclassified, as simple and direct experiences. Then, behind the special and imperfect stammerings which we call colour, sound, fragrance, and the rest, we sometimes discern a whole fact—at once divinely simple and infinitely various—from which these partial messages proceed; and which seeks as it were to utter itself in them.

Little Dog’s Rhapsody in the Night

by Mary Oliver

He puts his cheek against mine

and makes small, expressive sounds.

And when I’m awake, or awake enough

he turns upside down, his four paws

in the air

and his eyes, dark and fervent.

“Tell me you love me,” he says.

“Tell me again.”

Could there be a sweeter arrangement?

Over and over

he gets to ask.

I get to tell.